We all need to take these guiding Metadata principles and put them into practice.
We need industry wide commitment to use metadata.
We need to embrace metadata standards and best practices that have a consistent world-view approach.
We need technology that makes it easy to embed metadata, preserve it, and facilitate tracking and rights management.
Starting Today:
As an Industry Leader
- Work with other groups to encourage the adoption of metadata standards that address the needs of a broad constituency of metadata users.
- Get involved or support standards bodies and joint efforts such as IPTC, PLUS, UPDIG, Dublin Core or PRISM/DIM2.
- Make a commitment to educating your peers about the use of metadata.
- Make sure you are entering all critical metadata, such as copyright and creator contact information, into your images at the earliest possible point in your workflow; and always before passing on to other parties.
- Consider adding other forms of rich metadata, such as captions, keywords and unique identifiers, to make it easier for end users, distributors, and yourself to find your images.
- Make metadata the primary means of storing your image information and quit the practice of storing this information in separate, out-of-sync documents.
- Ensure that the applications you are using support current metadata standards, and if not, encourage the developers to make this a priority.
- Develop submission guidelines that require using embedded metadata, and specify which data or fields are required.
- Establish guidelines for the preservation of metadata embedded by the creator.
- Make it a standard practice to never remove or change ownership metadata already embedded in the file.
- Examine your existing image processing workflows to insure that metadata is not being indiscriminately "stripped" before posting online or delivering files to clients.
- Ensure that all embedded metadata in your image files complies with existing standards such as the IPTC Core schema.
- Make it a priority to complete the transition to a metadata-driven system for managing all of your digital assets.
- Check the images you receive to see if they have metadata, and if none is present, encourage the creator or distributor to include this vital information.
- Do not remove or change ownership metadata without first checking with the Image Creator or Copyright Holder.
- Insure that the applications used in your workflow are not removing or replacing metadata; and if they are, contact the developers to inquire why this is occurring.
- Begin the transition to a metadata-driven system to manage all of your digital assets.
- Insure that your products are compliant with current metadata standards, and backwards compatible with legacy systems and standards.
- Make preserving metadata the default option when copying, saving or exporting any image.
- Insure that user interfaces-for operations that remove metadata-are designed to allow users to clearly understand what they are about to do.
- Ensure that your implementations comply with I18N (internationalization) best practices.
- Ensure that the user interface provides easy (preferably inline) access to definitions for each metadata field.
See the Addendum for Technology Providers & Product Developers for additional suggestions.
Contributors
This document was prepared by SAA’s Imaging Technology Standards Committee: David Riecks, Chair; Rivaldo Does; and Betsy Reid, SAA Executive Director
